‘Sunshine’ chugging to La Jolla Playhouse

Musical will be based on offbeat Oscar winner

LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE'S UPDATED SEASON

Here’s the updated lineup for La Jolla Playhouse’s 2010-11 season. (The theater also will announce an additional musical for this fall, to replace the postponed “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.”)

• “Surf Report,” June 15 to July 11: San Diego native Annie Weisman (“Be Aggressive”) returns to the Playhouse with this world-premiere piece.

One of the most intriguing musical projects of the past few seasons is on its way to La Jolla Playhouse — and it’ll trundle in on the tires of a dusty VW bus.

The Playhouse is announcing today that come February 2011, it will stage the world premiere of “Little Miss Sunshine,” a show based on the Oscar-winning 2006 movie about an oddball family and their would-be pageant princess.

The adapters are two prominent Broadway names, both with some local history. James Lapine, a three-time Tony-winner who also landed a Pulitzer Prize for the 1984 musical “Sunday in the Park With George,” is writing the new show’s book and will direct. (His latest show, “Sondheim on Sondheim,” just opened in New York.)

William Finn, who wrote book, music and lyrics for the Tony-winning “Falsettos” (directed by Lapine) and also is the composer-lyricist behind the hit “25th Putnam County Spelling Bee,” will write the “Little Miss Sunshine” score and lyrics.

Playhouse artistic director Christopher Ashley says he felt the project was an ideal fit for the theater the moment he heard of it a couple of years ago.

“I love that film,” Ashley says. “I think the film is so demented and unexpected and wry and ultimately heartwarming, and then demented again. The tone of the film is brilliant, and the characters are so interesting and so rich.”

He also appreciated that the creative team has some ties to the Playhouse. Lapine directed a revival of the Stephen Sondheim-composed “Merrily We Roll Along” for La Jolla in 1985 (four years after it flopped on Broadway), and his play “Luck, Pluck and Virtue” premiered there in 1993. (In 1996, Lapine and Sondheim premiered “Into the Woods” at the Old Globe Theatre; it went on to become a Tony-winning Broadway hit.)

The film “Little Miss Sunshine,” which earned an Oscar for Michael Arndt’s screenplay, follows the motley, feuding Hoover family as they drive cross-country in their battered VW, intent on getting little Olive into a children’s beauty pageant. Tolerating (much less understanding) each other proves a hard road, but all wind up learning a thing or two about love and loss.